After spending decades being made the butt of jokes, Aquaman proved millions of his doubters wrong when James Wan’s DCEU blockbuster exploded into theaters in December 2018. The core concept of a man who can talk to fish and spends a lot of his time under the sea is patently ridiculous, but Wan used that to his advantage and crafted a comic book movie that was pure unadulterated fun.
Embracing the insanity of it all, Aquaman was the cinematic equivalent of a sugar rush, and the entire cast pitched their performances accordingly. Jason Momoa brought every ounce of his natural charisma to the title hero, while Patrick Wilson didn’t so much chew on the scenery as devour it whole. The film was big, dumb, loud and stupid escapist entertainment from the first frame to the very last, which is exactly what it should have been.
Audiences lapped it up, and Aquaman became the highest-grossing DC Comics adaptation ever made, but insider Daniel Richtman is now claiming that the second installment is being positioned as a darker and more mature affair. Obviously, this has been the standard approach to any big budget sequel since The Empire Strikes Back set the precedent 40 years ago, but it might not work in the case of Aquaman 2.
Of course, it did in small doses in the first one with the Trench sequence proving popular enough to launch its own spinoff, but we’re also talking about a movie that had an octopus playing the drums and roped in the legendary Julie Andrews to lend her vocal talents to a tentacled leviathan. The darker and more mature sequel has been done to death already, and one of the reasons that Aquaman was such a breath of fresh air for the DCEU is that it gleefully and deliberately abandoned that aesthetic. As such, let’s hope they don’t lean too heavily into that stuff and still manage to keep things fun and light for the most part.
